Mrs. Rogers spreads the gospel of music, laughter and kindness

Fred Rogers was certainly a good piano player. He wrote over 200 songs and 13 operas on his Steinway concert grand. He even dabbled in synthesizers and stalactite organs on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. But his wife, Joanne, was by far the superior pianist of the Rogers household.

Joanne Rogers (née Byrd) began studying piano as a young girl in Jacksonville, Fla., after a neighbor discovered her promising talent and recommended her to a private teacher.

"She really thought I was musical because I didn't bang on the piano — I picked out tunes," Rogers recalled in a Nov. 2018 TEDx Talk. "Then I had to learn the alphabet from A to G. That's all I needed."

Rogers continued her piano lessons, learned the rest of the alphabet, and eventually earned a Bachelor of Music from Rollins College. There she met her future husband, Fred, and her future musical collaborator, Jeannine Morrison.

After studying with Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi and receiving a master's degree from Florida State University, Rogers taught music at Chatham College and Carlow College and also took on private students.

In the 1970s, Rogers and Morrison started performing as a duo in concerts throughout the country.

"Over the next 36 years we played over 300 concerts," Morrison recently told the New York Times. "We were a remarkable team. We got a lot of good reviews in newspapers because of our precision."

Though they were close friends, Rogers and Morrison preferred to play on separate pianos. The urge to giggle was just too strong.

"They would start laughing because someone's elbow would punch the other by mistake or something," Morrison's son Alan told the New York Times.

Rogers and Morrison recorded two albums of duets and continued performing together until 2008. One of their favorite concert pieces was Debussy's En Blanc et Noir.

"One time we played it, and there was a little old man sitting in the first row," Rogers told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2002. "It ends very softly with just a single note, and this man said, in a voice that could be heard all over the place, 'They call that music!?'"

Rogers, the Post-Gazette added, laughed at the memory.

At 91, Rogers occasionally practices at home, though arthritis keeps her from playing very long. She attends performances by her friends Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, and she frequents the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

She also continues to promote her late husband's legacy through her work on behalf of The Fred Rogers Company and The Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media.

"Fred was a really, really fine musician," Rogers recalled during her TEDx Talk. "Music meant a lot to both of us. We had that in common."

In addition to music, Fred and Joanne also shared a love of laughter. As she told the Post-Gazette:

"[T]here is so much wonderful humor in music, and people sit and they don't feel free to laugh. I think it's wonderful to just sit there and laugh when you hear something that is just funny. I wish more people could share the humor in music."

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